A Man With No Face
by Neriad13
Summary: Technically, big daddies don't sleep. But they do dream of what it'd be like to shed their skin.


He doesn't sleep - not quite in the way that humans are able.

For one, the tanks on his back prevent him from lying down comfortably. They're always in the way, lifting his upper body off the floor, forcing him to sit upright even when his legs are falling out from under him. On top of that he has a pervasive fear about damaging something that was not designed to bear the weight of his bulk - the delicate valves and gauges that keep him alive, the glass tanks that contain his supply of ADAM and EVE.

They're an obvious target that splicers go after all the time. He hates how they glow, how easily broken they are compared to the rest of his gear and how, because of them, he's forced to take almost fanatical care in guarding his back.

And so, he does not ever lie down, though a nagging muscle memory, one of the many relics left behind by slapdash splicing, begs him to do so constantly.

Secondly, his body is not one that was designed to _need_ sleep. He was built with the aim of being a ceaselessly working machine. He can trudge the halls of Rapture for days without stopping. He can fight for hours on end, his punches never losing their strength or precision. He can spend a night on the ocean floor, welding tirelessly well past the hours and pressures that a human is capable of withstanding. It's very rarely his body that's the problem when it comes to rest.

It's his mind.

There are some things inside him that are beyond the touch of ADAM, that are hard-wired so deeply into the human brain that they can never quite be altered no matter how hard a lab tech may try. Though his body hardly ever feels tired, his mind is constantly breaking under the strain of all that he endures.

He knows he's reached his limit when he starts seeing ghosts. Normally, due to some combined trick of his physiology and filtration system, he sees them but seldom and out of the corners of his vision at that. It's when his nerves are so worn down that they start appearing in front of him that he knows he needs a pantomime of rest to silence the whispering in his head.

So he finds himself a decent alcove, as hidden as he can make it, in a spot where his back would preferably be against a wall. He checks at least half a dozen times to be sure the perimeter is clear. If he has any mines on him, he lays those out too.

And then he closes his eyes to take whatever type of rest he is able. His sleep is much lighter than that of a human. Any creak of the floorboards, any whisper of distant voices and he's awake in an instant, ready to kill whomever it was that disturbed him.

That happens fairly often. Getting a full nap in one go is something of an art form in Rapture.

But sometimes, when he has time and luck enough for his breathing to deepen and his mind to wander, he sees other types of ghosts.

*.*.*

It always begins as a nightmare.

His suit is unraveling at the seams. He can see the fibers of it moving of their own accord, feel the thin threads that keep him from being exposed to the air wriggle against his skin.

He tries to hold himself together.

 _No,_ he begs silently, hugging himself tight, his shoulders trembling with the effort. _Please. I don't know what's under there. I need that to live..._

He feels the weight of his helmet on his shoulders all of a sudden and buckles under it. It falls forward, hitting the tiles with a terrible reverberating _clang,_ the tubes connecting it to the tanks on his back ripping as though they were made of nothing more than soggy paper. It rolls until its porthole is staring up at him. It's like looking at his own detached face, though even in the dream he knows how silly that is. It was never his face. He'd merely preferred it to what it hid.

The fabric of the suit itself is fraying now, shredding at the seams in his shoulders and steadily working its way downward. He holds himself tighter. He knows there is no chance of repair after this point. His suit is unsound and there's not a mechanic in Rapture who will repair him. He's trapped where he is, the ocean pressing in around him, separating him forever from Eleanor.

He hears something shatter behind him and looks down to see a wave of glowing blue fluid wash over the sides of his boots. His EVE stores, gone, just like that. His oxygen and ADAM follow, the former hitting with another reverberating _clang,_ the latter shattering, its red contents mingling with the spilled EVE, but never quite mixing into one fluid.

All the little bits and bobs of metal that keep him in one piece are falling to the ground in a tinkling rain. He can feel the screws unscrewing themselves, the nuts dropping from his body.

His belt creaks and then its metal links detach from one another all at once, splashing in the puddle around his feet. His harness loosens and then slithers from his body to tangle, snakelike, around his ankles.

He hangs onto his gloves the longest. He clenches his fists, willing them to stay on, thinking that if he grips them hard enough, he won't lose this final part of himself. They feel so big on his hands. His fingers can barely fit into the fingers of the gloves.

With a shudder, he sees the tiny screws that hold the plate that bears his name starting to turn. He slaps his other hand over it, trying to push them back down with clumsy fingers and utterly failing. The screws fall to the ground, glinting like silver in the flickering light of a dying neon sign.

The gloves fall to pieces in his hands - shreds of leather and frayed canvas dropping off him like a husk. With a sob caught in his throat, neither quite monster or entirely human, he lets go.

The triangle scratched into the little metal plate flashes before his eyes and tumbles end over end to the ground, rolling into shadow. The remains of the gloves shred and fall from his hands like a layer of peeling skin.

It's over. He wants to cry and never get up. Who is he now? What is he, without the suit? What use is he to anyone?

He looks at his hands.

They're perfect.

The fingers are small and delicate, the nails neatly trimmed, the skin so pale that the faint thread work of blueish veins can be seen pulsing below the surface. He touches them, following a bigger one until it vanishes somewhere within the meat of his wrist.

He hugs himself again, basking in the feel of his own fingers against bare flesh, suddenly aware in a way he's never quite been before, of how cold it is here, down in the depths of the sea.

He looks down and realizes that he's knee deep in a pile of scrap. Looking at it now, it's hard to believe that all of it came off of him. He's so small compared to the size of the mound. How could it have possibly fit? Why had he been so afraid to lose it?

Taking care to avoid the broken glass and jagged shards of metal, he steps out of his boots. The tiled floor is like ice against his bare feet, but he marvels at the wonder of his toes, each joint bending precisely when he wills it, wriggling with a freedom that he didn't think he'd ever have.

His old helmet is still there, staring back at him. His reflection is faint in the porthole. He turns away before he is tempted to get a better look, a shudder running down his spine. He takes a step forward. And then another, and another, the remains of what he'd thought was his life fast being left behind.

For perhaps the first time in reliable memory, he looks up at the ceiling in wonder. It's a sheet of curved glass ribbed with bronze support beams. He can see the ocean far above his head and its denizens cavorting beneath the waves. A tiny part of his human self that was not entirely crushed under the weight of his conditioning remembers this feeling, though the memory of what might have caused it is long lost to the passage of time.

Rapture is as silent as a tomb, he comes to realize as he walks, unsure of the destination, but enjoying the journey well enough. He can hear the muffled slap of his own footsteps but nothing beyond that in the cavernous halls. No drugged mumblings of splicers lying in wait. No sad rumbles of other big daddies echoing down the halls. Even the near constant drip of water is entirely absent.

He thinks that he should be afraid - that he should always be afraid, in all situations and not just unusual ones - but for once, the feeling fails to register at all.

In the depths of his soul, he knows that Rapture is empty and that he is the sole ghost left standing.

He skips down the halls, delighting in the feeling of air rushing against his skin. He laughs aloud, the sound harsh and grating after years of disuse. He cracks his shoulders and realizes that they don't hurt anymore, that a weight that he hadn't realized he'd been carrying was all but gone. He wonders if he could do a backflip now and forgetting that one can do anything in dreams, decides not to test his luck.

At the end of the hallway is a grand ballroom. Outside the windows, festooned with pristine velvet curtains, he can see the strange, twisting forms of a coral reef. An eel slips out of its hole, peers through the glass at him with a glare and quickly darts back inside.

There is music playing from a source he can't identify, suffusing the room with silvery piano notes cascading like water around him. As they grow in intensity and vigor, he dances, whirling like a madman in the empty space, his arms outstretched, his feet clumsily skipping to the tempo.

He looks up and the ocean is above him, held in place by the reaching arms of straining golden statues, their eyes blank as they look down upon him. He spins and spins as the music rises, the statues whirling above him, the ocean all around. He closes his eyes and puts his head back, tears running down his face at the beauty of everything, the peace he never thought he'd feel again, the freedom of being able to do exactly as he wished. And then, at the crescendo of the song…

His heel comes down hard on something sharp and he falls to the ground.

The music stops. His eyes flick open just in time to see the lights go out, save for the lone ring of illumination cast on him.

Everything hurts. The weight comes back to rest on his shoulders like an old friend. He lays there for a moment, his whole body throbbing so badly that can't differentiate which part of him was actually injured at first.

His foot. He had stepped on something.

With great force of will, straining against the invisible weight, he sits upright to inspect the wound.

There's part of a rusty metal corkscrew embedded in his heel, screwed into his flesh as though someone had mistaken him for a wine bottle. He touches it gingerly, afraid of what will happen if he tries to pull it straight out.

His fingers brush it and he sees a girl, her eyes glowing yellow, her smile beaming as she shows him what she's made.

 _Look, Daddy - it's you!_

Trembling, he peers beyond his small circle of light to see the thing that the corkscrew had broken off of.

It's in his hand, faster than thought. Its helmet is a baseball, the shape of its porthole mimicked by the face of an expensive watch and the pair of wires holding it in place. There's a little tank on its back, with a bottlecap for a valve and on the end of its wrist is the cuff of the corkscrew that was meant to represent a drill.

He cradles it to his chest, his shoulders shaking.

Something is moving beyond his perception. He feels as though he is rising through many layers of dark water, the sea rushing past him. A part of him pleads against going, begs to stay, to be someone besides Delta, that anything would be better than going back, _please, please, please…_

He opens his eyes and sees the world through the foggy glass of his porthole.

*.*.*

"You there…sport?" Sinclair wheezes through the crackling of his radio. "Oxygen's runnin' thin in this train car, and I'd sure hate to see our partnership cut short. Not to…hurry you or anything, but…"

The radio falls silent before the thought is completed. Delta groans. He's in the backroom of some type of flophouse in Siren's Alley, wedged into a corner where he had hoped no one would find him. The leg of a table is digging uncomfortably into his heel. He moves his foot a little too fast and the entire table comes crashing down.

Shoving it aside, every muscle in his body aching, he struggles to his feet, the top of his helmet inches away from bumping into the low ceiling above him. He shambles through the darkness for a time, alternately bumping into furniture or crushing it beneath his feet.

At last, he stumbles outdoors into the dim twilight that passes for daylight in Rapture. He can see a fire burning in the distance and the silhouettes of splicers, the ears of their masks looking like things attached and not merely placed there, warming their hands around it.

Before jumping in, he looks at his own hands, the fingers thick and fat, the leather of his gloves fitting like a sausage casing.

The plate on the back of his left hand, a triangle haphazardly scratched into the metal.

He touches it, wondering what sort of person he would be if it hadn't been affixed to him. If the weight that came with that designation was not something he had to bear.

One of the silhouettes snaps around to look at him. He sees the glint of a gun being pulled out of a holster.

His drill roars as he brings it to life and they scatter before him.


End file.
